The Longest Relationship

Wednesday, November 15, 2017 / 9:57 PM

I'm not going to pretend to be any wiser than I was in 2016.

Last year, I wrote a post about the importance of falling in love – with your dreams, with your life, with yourself. It's a reminder that I let slip away from me almost as soon as I wrote the post because it was so much easier to fall back into old habits than to fall in love with all of the possibilities that life could bring.

But isn't it true that the longest relationship you'll have in your life is with yourself? So why is it that that relationship – the one with ourselves – is the hardest to maintain?

When I was a kid, I hated doing things alone. I was lucky that I grew up with a sister who was close in age, so we shared a room, we shared interests, we went to the same schools and had the same extracurriculars, we shared the same quiet time. But in college, I started noticing more and more of a desire in myself to have some time alone – time to write, time to think, time to exist. In New York especially, that "alone time" became so rare because the city never allowed it, and I got used to it and learned how to find my own spaces without feeling suffocated or too alone.

But in the past few years, I've really embraced this idea of "being alone," because I think I've finally sorted out that "being alone" is not the same as "being lonely," which it's often paired together with.

2017 has been a rough year in trying to figure out what it means to take care of yourself, to nurture the relationship with yourself without becoming isolated from everyone and everything. It's a work in progress, but I'm slowly getting there.